In the first days of October the American colonels Martin Moses and Arthur Noble came into the Cordillera and proclaimed a single command over all the guerrillas of North Luzon — the United States Army Forces in the Philippines, North Luzon. They ordered every band, from Ablan and Praeger to Lapham, Cushing, Molintas, and Volckmann, to rise together and strike the enemy on the fifteenth. For the first time the scattered fighters of the north had one order and one name.

The schools opened again under the occupation, and the lessons had changed. Nippongo, the Japanese language, was taught in the classrooms, and the songs and civics of the new order with it. Parents sent their children because a child in school was a child fed and accounted for. What the children were taught at home was another lesson.

At Misamis a Japanese inter-island steamer, the Tular, tried to put in at the harbor. From an old Spanish fort on the shore, flying an American flag, Fertig's guerrillas opened fire and drove the ship off. The enemy did not forget it: the Military Administration sent nine fresh garrison battalions south to Mindanao and the Visayas to break the resistance. The islands had shown they could bite; the occupier showed it would bite back.

In Iloilo, Japanese soldiers came for a girl of thirteen, Tomasa Solingnog, to take her to an army brothel. Her father stood in their way, and they killed him where he stood. Such things were not printed in the newspapers; they passed from mouth to mouth, and were not forgotten. The islands were learning that no house lay beyond the reach of the occupation.

The Military Administration promised the islands would feed themselves. It brought in a fast-growing Formosan strain of rice, the horai, set quotas on the paddies, and declared the Philippines would be self-sufficient within the year. On the ground the plan met a hungry season, broken transport, and a countryside that would not give up its grain quietly. The promise outran the harvest.

In the hills of Misamis the mining engineer Wendell Fertig gathered the scattered guerrilla bands of Mindanao under one command and proclaimed a Free Philippine Government on ground the enemy did not hold. It printed its own emergency money, opened courts and a post office, and told the island the war was not over. The Japanese held the coast towns; Fertig held the country between them.

In the mountains above the Pampanga plain, the brothers Fassoth had run a camp that sheltered American and Filipino soldiers escaped from Bataan. In October the Japanese broke a captured runner, found the camp, and fell on it — thirty of the men were killed and others taken. To save his family, Bill Fassoth gave himself up. The mountains had hidden many; they could not hide everyone.

On the night of the fifteenth the north rose as ordered. Baldwin's and Swick's men destroyed the Japanese garrisons at Sanhiglo and Balatoc that guarded the Itogon mines above Baguio, and held the ground for more than a week. Praeger's radio carried the news out to Australia. Then the enemy came back with infantry and tanks, drove the guerrillas into the mountains, and burned the villages in reprisal. The rising had shown the north was armed; it had also shown the price the towns would pay.

The occupation money the people called Mickey Mouse money bought less with every printing. A cavan of rice that had cost six or seven pesos before the war now cost thirty, and rice itself was slipping to the black market. The occupiers simply printed more notes to buy what they needed. A family's savings turned to paper in their hands.

The same mountains that had always divided the islands now sheltered them. In the pine ridges of the Cordillera and the rain forests of Mindanao, the men who would not surrender found cover the enemy could not clear. The rice terraces fed the highland camps; the forest hid the trails. The land itself had become part of the resistance.

On Mindoro the bishop of Calapan, Wilhelm Finnemann, had refused the Japanese his convent for a brothel and had spoken against the taking of women. In the third week of October they arrested him, beat him, and held him without food. On the twenty-sixth, on the pretext of moving him to Manila, they took him out on a boat and threw him into the sea near Verde Island. A shepherd, he had said, does not leave his flock.

On Panay, Colonel Macario Peralta had rebuilt the old 61st Division in the hills. On the thirtieth his radioman, Mariano Tolentino, using a set salvaged from an abandoned British freighter at Sara, sent plain uncoded words across the sea until Australia answered. On Negros too, Roy Bell and a stray radioman put a transmitter together near Dumaguete. After half a year of silence, the Visayas had found their voice.

At Taguilid Pass near Pamplona, Juan Miranda and sixty-seven men of the Tangcong Vaca unit caught a Japanese column on the road. In two and a half hours they killed the Naga commander, Colonel Takechi, several of his officers, and close to two hundred soldiers. It was the heaviest blow the Bicol guerrillas had struck. They would learn within days what such a blow could cost.

For a week in November three hundred and fifty Japanese hunted Russell Volckmann and Donald Blackburn through the pine country of Benguet. The two Americans slipped the net, only to reach their camps at Uding and Equip and find them burned. They turned south and went deeper, into the rice-terrace country of Ifugao, to begin again.

Fertig's command took its first firm shape. The guerrilla units of Misamis Occidental and Zamboanga were gathered into the 106th Infantry Regiment, the first regular regiment of the Mindanao resistance. What had been bands of stragglers now drilled as soldiers again, with ranks and orders and a flag.

The answer came from Colonel Inuye at Libmanan. He ordered the people of thirteen towns of Camarines Sur to leave their barrios and gather in the town centers within seventy-two hours. Then his troops, with paid informers to guide them, swept the mountains for two weeks — burning fields, destroying the standing crops, and killing those they found. The guerrillas had struck the enemy; the enemy struck the people.

In northern La Union the pressure told. Under constant Japanese attack, part of the 121st Infantry — one of the guerrilla regiments of the north — came apart and surrendered together. The men were marched off to Camp O'Donnell at Capas, where the Bataan survivors were already dying. Not every unit could hold; the mountains gave shelter, but they did not give food or bullets.

The occupation tied the rice ration to the neighborhood association, and so nearly every family joined one. The men were called to patrol their own streets at night and to report every arrival and departure, every stranger, every whispered thing. Neighbor was set to watch neighbor. Yet some reported nothing that could harm a soul, and the associations would later hide the underground inside their own ledgers.

From Panay, Peralta reached out to the other islands. He sent Lieutenant Enrique Jurado to organize Mindoro, with Ramon Ruffy over the constabulary and Esteban Beloncio over the civil population. On Negros, Salvador Abcede was building a force of seven thousand near Tanjay; on Romblon, Captain Raval's small band was folded into Peralta's Fourth Philippine Corps. What had been island bands were becoming a command that crossed the water.

On the rice plain the Hukbalahap squadrons — companies of a hundred or two hundred tenant farmers — struck at what moved on the roads. They ambushed the supply convoys, raided the isolated garrisons, and cut the bridges and rail lines of Tarlac and Pampanga. The occupier held the towns by day; by night the plain belonged to the Huk.

The great sugar estates that had fed the islands' cash economy stood without a market. The mills fell quiet; some fields were ordered turned to cotton for the empire, others to food. On Negros, where cane had been king, people learned to eat what the cane land could be made to grow. The war had reached even the soil.

At the end of November the Military Administration's director of general affairs, Colonel Utsunomiya, gathered his branch chiefs in Manila. The order was plain: the copper of the islands must be dug and shipped to Japan, and iron with it, for the empire's war. Yet even as he spoke he warned that the sea lanes were no longer safe. The occupation wanted the wealth of the islands, and was finding it harder to carry away.

A year to the day since the war reached the islands, the Executive Commission under Jorge Vargas issued Proclamation Number 109. Every political party was dissolved and forbidden. In their place stood one only — the Kapisanan sa Paglilingkod sa Bagong Pilipinas, the KALIBAPI, the single association through which the occupation would speak to the people. The old political life of the Commonwealth ended by decree.

On the same anniversary the administration ordered the government clerks of Manila into a parade, and put the emperor's picture on the screen at the Lyric. When President Roosevelt's face appeared the theater cheered; when the emperor's came, the hall went silent and would not clap. Japanese officers drew their sabers and cleared the seats. The people had found a way to speak that no proclamation could forbid.

Driven out of Benguet, Volckmann came to rest in the rice-terrace country of Ifugao and made his camp at Kiangan. Around him he began to gather the guerrilla army of North Luzon that Moses and Noble had named but not yet built. He would hold these mountains until the war's last day and never be taken. Kiangan, where he settled, would one day see the very end of it.

From Port Moresby the word came for Peralta on Panay: gather intelligence, and lie low. MacArthur forbade him to declare martial law or to fight in the open, for every guerrilla battle brought a Japanese sweep down on the villages. It was a hard order for fighting men — to wait, and watch, and spare the people the reprisal. The long war would be won by patience as much as by courage.

Colonel Ruperto Kangleon, a Leyte man and a soldier of the old army, broke out of the Japanese prison camp in Agusan and made his way home across the water to Leyte. There he took up the slow work of drawing the island's quarreling guerrilla bands toward one command. It would take him the better part of a year, but the man who would lead the Leyte resistance was free and back on his own ground.

On the slopes of Mount Isarog the Tangcong Vaca men under Juan Miranda met the Camp Isarog band of Lorenzo Padua. On the twenty-first they agreed to join under one command, and a woman officer, Lieutenant Constancia Estrada, drew up the terms. Two small forces had become one larger one. In Bicol as in the north, the year ended with the guerrillas closing ranks.

The first Christmas of the occupation came quietly. In the churches the Misa de Gallo was said as it had always been, but the tables were thin and the money was paper. Families remembered the sons in the hills, and the ones in Fort Santiago and Capas and Santo Tomas. They kept the feast on what they had, and they kept their hopes to themselves.

On Christmas Day in the Sulu sea, Moro guerrillas under Lieutenant Abdulrahim Imao fell on the weak Japanese garrison at Siasi and carried off thirty rifles and their ammunition. When the enemy came back for them, the Moros held. In the far south, among the islands the Spaniards had never fully held, the war against Japan was a Moro fight too.

Not all the men in the hills were brothers. In Tayabas, Gaudencio Vera, who had given himself the rank of general, had a Tangcong Vaca officer named Vicente Villa put to death for failing to honor a rank Vera had never earned. The guerrilla world had its warlords and its quarrels, and good men died in them. It is part of the story, and it is told here plainly.

On Rizal Day, the death anniversary of the national hero, the KALIBAPI was formally inaugurated in Manila, the patriotic date chosen on purpose. Benigno Aquino was made its Director-General. The occupation offered the people one door to public life, and told them it was the door of the new Filipino nation.